1) Field of the Invention
The invention relates to a dividing device.
2) Description of the Prior Art
It is common practice to supply a flow of material, preferably dough material or minced meat or stuffing for croquettes and the like, to a dividing device by means of a vacuum fill machine. As the vacuum fill machine is an expensive machine, it is preferred to provide the vacuum fill machine with a dividing device, wherein the flow of material is first divided into various flows which are as similar as possible and which are subsequently divided into portions dependently or independently of each other. It is desirable here that the size and weight of the portions are repeated as accurately as possible. In many production situations it is desirable to keep the standard deviation between the portions as small as possible.
Known from for instance WO-A2-98/22206 is a dividing device provided with a device for converting one flow of material into a plurality of flows, wherein the device is provided with a vane-type rotor. A drawback of the described embodiments however is that very large standard deviation was found to occur in the size of the flows and therefore the portions, particularly in the case of viscous materials. In addition, the number of flows from such a machine cannot be increased. A machine which for instance converts one flow into four flows cannot be enlarged into a machine converting one flow into six flows. The only possibility is to place an additional dividing device, wherein the infeed flow is first separated into two flows and shared over two identical dividing devices. It is virtually impossible to meet the requirements of a customer in respect of the number of output flows. After all, a manufacturer cannot stock all different embodiments with a different number of output flows. These embodiments must therefore be made specially on demand for a customer, whereby the dividing device is expensive to manufacture.
WO-A2-98/22206 has gone part-way in attempting to deal with this drawback by dividing the internal mechanism, i.e. the pump chambers and the vane-type rotors, into almost identical segments, one segment for each outgoing flow. The outer housing is however in one piece and cannot be modified.